Skilled staff and budgets are still obstacles for many companies

With the ongoing interest in applying Big Data to marketing we thought this was a useful report to share - IDG Enterprise’s '2015 Big Data and Analytics Report' surveyed over 1,100 brands in the UK and Australia to find out which stage they are at in terms of planning or deploying 'Big Data' projects and to reveal their plans and challenges this year. The report identified that the top 3 priorities for the majority of businesses is to invest in analytics, visual dashboards and data mining. Challenges were still prevalent for many companies who felt they were lacking in-house technical skills, so as a result are looking to hire 'Business Analysts' and 'Data Architects' to facilitate this if they can obtain the budget - yet another obstacle to overcome. …

Developing skills needed for data-driven marketers who can understand and apply metrics and analytics

Becoming a data-driven organisation doesn’t just rely on the right technology, structure and processes. The human element is essential, and without the right skills, qualities and roles, any effort to be successful at data-driven marketing is destined to struggle.

The kinds of skills that support a data-driven philosophy are rich and varied

'The team needs to be technically savvy,' says Jim Sterne, Founder of the Digital Analytics Association. "They do not need to be technologists, but they need to understand how the Internet functions at the bits-and-bytes level, so they can make the most of it at the human level. The team needs to understand how data is gathered and where it may have weaknesses so they can make informed decisions about which numbers to trust in which…

Big Data’s Impact on Email Marketers

If you aren’t talking about the opportunities for content marketing in 2015, you are probably talking about the opportunities for ‘Big Data’.  Next to content marketing, big data is a hot trend in marketing right now. Everyone is talking about how they can take advantage of all the data they have on hand; how to slice it, dice it and serve it up with a actionable meaning.

Missed opportunities that changes everything

Currently, only 25% of businesses are putting their own data into action. This indicates a significant amount of missed opportunities, the likes of which can be extremely valuable once companies discover how to use data in order to drive more engagement, greater reach and growing their business. Emarketer.com reported that when KPMG asked CFOs and CIOs about the impact of big data on business strategy, more than half stated that it was changing everything. That’s a…

Be objective by using Business Intelligence

One of the most pertinent quotes about the data analytics industry was said by Jim Barksdale, former Netscape CEO: 'If we have data, let’s look at data. If all we have are opinions, let’s go with mine.' This strikes a chord in businesses, especially when it comes to strategizing and improving the user experience (UX) where perceptions of how good an online experience is, with all its benefits and constraints, is shaped by the personal backgrounds and expertise of many individuals within an industry. Developers, designers, and information architects will all come up with different critiques and directions to the same issue.

Business Intelligence is your only objective friend

Tapping into the power of BI as a way to improve user experience

BI and data analytics, on the other hand, give businesses fact-based assessments, numbers, and…

Key approaches to develop your marketing analytics strategy

When you first begin venturing into the world of marketing analytics, it’s easy to get overwhelmed. Why? Well, put simply, marketing analytics is made up of a number of processes and technologies that help you analyze the performance of your marketing efforts. By measuring marketing data, you can determine where to adjust your strategies, improving your ROI. And because it’s all about tracking and responding to data, your first instinct might be 'the more data, the better!' but that can be a slippery slope. You’ll soon learn that crafting an effecting strategy can help streamline your processes and give you more 'bang' for your metaphorical analytics 'buck.'

Why you need a marketing analytics strategy

Your strategy acts as a plan that informs the purpose of analyzing the data you collect. Rather than just looking through all…

Fight the Big Data Backlash and use Smart Data help you identify purchase intent

Big data is starting to experience some significant backlash. A ‘case in point’ comes from a recent popular article in VentureBeat: ‘Big data’ is dead. What’s next? The backlash is more to do with the buzz than the data but the reason relates to the difficulty of extracting meaningful insights from big data. Born from the backlash comes another buzzword; smart data, a means of extracting these meaningful insights from big data. Looking past the marketing hype, smart data is actually the metamorphosis of big data into something actionable. Here we look at recognizing purchase intent as an example of actionable data extraction.

Big data vs Smart data rundown

So let’s start with the basic question of what is big data? Big data refers to massive volumes of structured and unstructured…

How to increase communications relevance through more personalised, contextual messages based on customer insight

Data is the key to understanding your customers and delivering new insights, but data in itself is just a series of 1s and 0s until you can bring meaning and interpretation.

Knowing and understanding your data is the first step in delivering relevant communications and customer value, as you turn raw data into information and then actionable insight. Starting this journey however can be a difficult step as highlighted in the 2013 Teradata Data-Driven Marketing Survey which stated:

‘Nearly 50 percent of marketers agree that data is the most underutilised asset in their organisation, with less than 10 percent saying they currently use what data they have in a systematic way’

Where to start?

There are several ways to data discovery and data…

How Big Data enables the relationship between data types to be explored

In my previous article in this series exploring the application of Big Data to marketing, I looked at how the Velocity component of Big Data provides greater understanding of your customers, improving marketing performance. In this post, I will explore the third of the 3 Vs, the potential impact of Variety on Marketing Variety covers the multiple types of data that are now available from the established structured data of tables and columns, with defined elements and values, to the many unstructured free format types of data. In recent years the amount of unstructured data and machine generated data is increasing at an exponential rate, being the major proportion (>80%) of the vast volumes of data now in existence. So what does this…

Part 3 in a series showing how Big Data can support marketing

In my previous article in this series exploring the application of Big Data to marketing, I looked at how the Volume component of Big Data provides breadth and depth to your understanding of your customers. In this post, I will explore the second of the 3 Vs, the potential impact of Velocity on Marketing.

Let’s first look at what we mean by Velocity and put down a simple definition of ‘Velocity is the speed of data growth/change’.

In the last few years, the accumulation of data has grown at an astonishing rate, with the amount of data increasing by 2.5 exabytes each day or 40% annually at current rates and accelerating.

The big question is, what does velocity mean for businesses looking to tap into it and does this speed of growth/change…

Continuing our briefing on how to apply Big Data for Marketing

In the first post in this short series I gave an introduction to using Big Data for marketing.  That introductory post included an overview of the concept and looked at the three core elements Volume, Velocity and Variety. In this second post in the series, I will look at the impact of the increase volumes of data associated with Big Data - what does this mean in practice for real-world marketing? Of the 3 V’s, Volume is the easiest to relate to Big Data, as it is about the amount of data, which as of 2012 stood at ~2.5 zettabytes and is expected to grow to almost 7.9 zettabytes by 2015. It is however a controversial area with many differing opinions on what constitutes ‘big volume’. To my 5 year…